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<TITLE>CS631 Course Information</TITLE>
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<H1><CENTER><A NAME="HDT0">CS631 Course Information </A></CENTER> </H1>

<H3>
<li><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><a href=#2>What &amp; When</a>
<li><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><a href=#3>Projects and Grades</a>
<li><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><a href=#4>The Bottom Line: What You Must Do</a>
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<H1><a name="2">What &amp; When</H1>

<H2>Lectures </H2>

<DL COMPACT>
<DT>Mon, Wed, Fri 1:25-2:15 pm Olin 155 
</DL>

<H2>Prerequisites </H2>

<P>
CS 314 and CS 414, or equivalent courses. Students are expected
to understand fundamental issues in operating systems, file systems,
and networks and to be comfortable programming in the C programming
language. 
<H2>Lecture Notes, Texts, and References </H2>

<P>
Multimedia is a new and rapidly developing field. A comprehensive
text that is appropriate to this course is not available. The
required readings for this class will consist of selected journal
and conference articles, as well as notes we will produce. All
required readings will be made available in class. You are expected
to read the material <I>before</I> coming to class -- you will
get significantly more out of the lectures if you do so.
<H3>Required </H3>

<P>
We will hand out course notes and copies of the relevant papers.
Whenever possible, we will place these on-line, but many of the
papers are not available on line and can only be copied. Since
the copying costs go well beyond the amount allocated for the
course, you will be ask to pay $30 towards the copying costs.
Please give a check (no cash) to the Cindy Robinson (Upson 4146)
payable to &quot;Cornell University.&quot; In the &quot;memo&quot;
section of the check, write the course number (CS631).
<H3>Optional </H3>

<UL>
<LI>Partridge, <I>Gigabit Networking</I>, Addison Wesley Publishing
Company, 1993. 
<LI>Jain, <I>Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing</I>, Prentice
Hall, 1989. 
</UL>

<P>
You are not required to buy the optional books. Partridge is an
excellent text on next generation networks, Jain is a great text
on Digital Image Processing.
<H3>On-line resources </H3>

<P>
There will be a newsgroup for this course (cornell.class.cs631)
and a WWW home page (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Courses/Current/CS631).
The slides used in lecture will be available electronically, as
will any handouts that we write and several of the papers for
the course.
<HR>

<H1><a name = "3">Projects and Grades </H1>

<H2>Laboratory Facilities </H2>

<P>
All enrolled students will be given accounts in the Upson CS Undergraduate
Lab (room 315). You are welcome to use other machines for doing
assignments.
<H2>Requirements, Grading, and Regrades </H2>

<P>
CS631 is a graduate course, and will be graded like one. We expect
to give out mostly A's, but this depends on your doing the assigned
work. There is no final exam or mid-term in this course.
<P>
Your grade is determined by three measures. First, you will be
graded on your answers to three homework assignments that will
require programming and/or written responses. Second, you will
complete a small scale research project. The homework assignments
will constitute 25% of your grade, the project will count for
75% of your grade. Third, you will required to read 75% of the
papers passed out. For each paper you read, you must post a critique
of the paper on the Web (see below). You must get a passing grade
on 75% of the critiques to pass this course. The critiques otherwise
have no effect on your grade.
<P>
You should work in groups of two or three on all assignments.
When working in a group, hand in a <I>single</I> response for
the group that includes the names of <I>all </I>students in the
group. The same grade will be given to each student. We expect
all students in a group to be equally able to answer questions
about the program or project.
<P>
Written problem sets should be turned in electronically before
the beginning of the lecture on the due date. Instructions for
handing in assignments will be given with the assignment. Late
assignments will be rejected. Assignments will be returned electronically.
<P>
Grades will be posted (indexed by a secret ID number you provide)
on the web. If you believe that we have made a grading error,
please bring the matter to our attention, but no later than <I>one
week</I> after your assignment has been returned. To submit a
problem set for regrading, send a short note explaining clearly
why you think it should be regraded to one of the TAs.
<H2>Academic Integrity </H2>

<P>
We expect students in CS631 to uphold Cornell's standards of academic
integrity. If we find out otherwise, <I>you will fail the course</I>.
The work you submit in CS 631 is expected to be the result of
your individual effort. You are free to discuss course material,
approaches to problems, and details of the system with your colleagues
and instructors, but you should never misrepresent someone else's
work as your own. Permissible cooperation should never involve
a student possessing a copy of all or part of another student's
program or other work --- regardless of whether that copy is on
paper or in a computer file on a hard disk or a floppy disk.
<P>
The only exception to the above rules is when students work together
to submit a joint project. 
<P>
It is also the student's responsibility to protect his/her work
from unauthorized access. For example, do not discard copies of
your programs in public places. If someone turns in your work,
<I>you</I> may be held partly responsible.
<HR>

<H1><a name="4">The Bottom Line: What You Must Do </H1>

<P>
You must do three things to complete this course: assignments,
critiques, and the project. Each assignment will tell you what
you have to hand in. Critiques and projects are described below.
<H2>Critiques </H2>

<P>
For 75% of the papers you receive, you must publish a critique
of the paper on the web. The critique should be available from
your CS 631 web page (which you will create in homework assignment
one). The purpose of this critique is to get you to think critically
about what you read (welcome to graduate school, Virginia). For
each paper, your critique should answer the following questions
in one to two paragraphs:
<OL>
<LI>What is the MAIN POINT of this paper?
<LI>What is SIGNIFICANT about this paper?
<LI>Could and experience practitioner REPRODUCE the results in
this paper?
<LI>What is WEAK about the paper? How could it have been improved
(either the research or the writing)?
<LI>Rate the paper on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best). 
</OL>

<P>
We will examine these critiques to determine if you have read
and understood the paper..
<H2>Project Guidelines </H2>

<P>
The final project is a small scale research project. It must have
two qualities: it must attack a <I>research</I> problem, and it
must pertain to multimedia. So what is &quot;research&quot;? Research
proposes and evaluates a new solution to an interesting problem.
This simple statement has two parts:
<UL>
<LI><I>Research proposes and evaluates a new solution</I>... Simply
stating an idea, or writing a program, is not research, because
there is no evaluation. You must evaluate the idea for it to become
research. Evaluation can take many forms. For example, suppose
you develop a new method for detecting scene breaks in a video
sequence. You can evaluate this idea by implementing it and compare
the results of your algorithm on realistic video sequences with
that of an existing algorithm. Such a comparison might compare
the runtime performance or the quality of result (how accurately
did it detect the scene breaks?). Or you might compare the results
of your algorithm to the &quot;best&quot; results (one that a
human produces). Another example of evaluation is designing a
large system, implementing it, and then discussing the tradeoffs
in the system design. Such &quot;experience&quot; papers are very
valuable to other system builders. Sometimes, but rarely, an idea
can be novel enough that simply stating it causes such a new way
of looking at things that it is research. This is a <I>very</I>
hard thing to sell, however, so it better be earth shaking.
<LI><I>&#133;to and interesting problem</I>. So how can you tell
what is interesting. This is clearly subjective, but a good metric
is to ask how many people want to know the answer to your problem?
As P. B. Medawar, wrote in <I>Advice to a Young Scientist</I>:
&quot;The only person interested in why 35% of sea anemones have
black spots is the person studying why 65% of sea anemones do
not have black spots&quot; (badly paraphrased by Brian). Remember:
it is just as hard to do uninteresting research as it is to do
interesting research. 
</UL>

<P>
You will work in groups of two to four students on the final project.
If you want to work individually or in a larger group, you must
ask Brian <I>before</I> <B>Sept 23<SUP>rd</SUP></B>. We will provide
a list of possible projects a few weeks into the course, or you
may explore an idea of your own, subject to our approval.
<P>
You will be required to write a project report approximately ten
pages in length and to make a 15 minute oral presentation. Your
grade will be based equally on the quality of your research, the
quality of your writing, and the quality of your presentation.
Sign up sheets for the presentation will be available later. The
best projects will be selected to present in class during the
last week of classes.
<P>
Three milestones, at the 5, 6, and 9 week marks, will help to
measure your progress. The first milestone (<B>Sept 23<SUP>rd</SUP></B>)
will be a brief written presentation (one to two paragraphs) of
your <I>two</I> proposed projects (a primary and a backup). Such
papers are called &quot;white papers&quot; in normal research
projects. The second milestone (<B>Sept 30<SUP>th</SUP></B>) will
be a short (approximately 2 page) written project proposal. The
third milestone (<B>Oct 21<SUP>st</SUP> - Oct 25<SUP>th</SUP></B>)
will be a 5 minute presentation on the status of your project.
The final presentation will take place on <B>Nov 25<SUP>th</SUP>
and 26<SUP>th</SUP></B>. 

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